The New York Times has a piece on the “illusion” of free will.
Mark Hallett, a researcher with the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, said, “Free will does exist, but it’s a perception, not a power or a driving force. People experience free will. They have the sense they are free.
“The more you scrutinize it, the more you realize you don’t have it,” he said.
Certainly, this view seems to be gaining ground with the medicalisation of a dizzying array of human conditions, behaviours and “lifestyle choices”. If a person’s proclivity for evil and wickedness may, as some now suggest, be genetically encoded or visible through the advances of neuroscience then the natural consequence of this knowledge is that evil might be prevented by identifying those who have such a tendency — even if that tendency has not yet been realised.
Dr. Wegner of Harvard said: “We worry that explaining evil condones it. We have to maintain our outrage at Hitler. But wouldn’t it be nice to have a theory of evil in advance that could keep him from coming to power?”
He added, “A system a bit more focused on helping people change rather than paying them back for what they’ve done might be a good thing.”
The Economist magazine recently discussed this same issue, concluding that the erosion of the idea of free will will also lead to an erosion of freedom:
Such disorders are serious pathologies. But the National DNA Database being built up by the British government (which includes material from many innocent people), would already allow the identification of those with milder predispositions to anger and violence. How soon before those people are subject to special surveillance? And if the state chose to carry out such surveillance, recognising that the people in question may pose particular risks merely because of their biology, it could hardly then argue that they were wholly responsible for any crime that they did go on to commit.
Nor is it only the criminal law where free will matters. Markets also depend on the idea that personal choice is free choice. Mostly, that is not a problem. Even if choice is guided by unconscious instinct, that instinct will usually have been honed by natural selection to do the right thing. But not always. Fatty, sugary foods subvert evolved instincts, as do addictive drugs such as nicotine, alcohol and cocaine. Pornography does as well. Liberals say that individuals should be free to consume these, or not. Erode free will, and you erode that argument.
In fact, you begin to erode all freedom. Without a belief in free will, an ideology of freedom is bizarre. Though it will not happen quickly, shrinking the space in which free will can operate could have some uncomfortable repercussions.
10 comments ↓
Doesn’t islam- with its doctrine that god knows the whole future and so determines our every action- do quite a lot of damage to the concept of free will itself? In fact, if people know about the environmental and genetic factors that influence their behaviour and can take steps to stop them doing so, aren’t they freer than they are if they are unaware of them?
The first part of your comment is a very important discussion in all theistic religions.
To what extent in an Omnipotent and merciful God(Allah SWT) responsible for the actions of individuals and to what extent are they autonomous authors of their own actions?
The complete answer to that question is actually several textbooks long,( and I might add Islamic theology here is supported by our current understanding of Quantum mechanics)
I may get around to posting the answer as a separate post.
As for the science discussed in this article, the evidence base is not great and it would be best to describe it as a hypothesis which is supported by some evidence but contradicted by other evidence.
Well, an omnipotent god, by definition, is responsible for everything that happens. This doesn’t apply only to islam but to all the Abrahamic religions.
Sorry- a lot of my last post didn’t get through~:
The more we know about our restrictions the more free will we can actually exercise. someone who doesn’t know about gravity and its effects may exercise their free will to step through a twentieth storey window, but they’ll never exercise it again. Equally a diabetic or someone who nows that they are more likely to become violent in particular circumstances can choose to avoid those situations.
But surely Robot, knowing these “limitations” simply shows us that we do not have absolute free will at all then? There are limits, and restrictions on our choices, based on pre-existing conditions and norms.
Of course we don’t have absolute free will, Dezhen. However, if we know about the limitations on it we can more effectively exercise the free will we do have. Someone with a genetic tendency to alcoholism who knows about it and doesn’t drink alcohol is in a better position than someone who doesn’t know and assumes they can be a conventional moderate drinker.
I agree with you wholeheartedly.
But surely that in effect means that the Godhead/Creator/Supreme Being/whatever that believers follow can be said to dictate even what we perceive as “free”? Specifically in the Abrahamic traditions, as you mentioned above.
Well, I’m not a believer, and one reason I’m not is that I think that there is a complete opposition between free will and an all-knowing god. I was referring to free will in the general philosiphical/psychological sense with reference to the various nonreligious theories of determinism. That’s why i was interested in you reference to dealing with the muslim attitude in another post- I don’t, myself, think that qualtum theory helps the muslim/christian view, but I’d be interested to see why you think it does.
This is an interesting discussion, one which would have been groundbreaking if we had it a thousand years ago, u the classical Islamic position remains unchanged and (not for the first time) has been copied by European thinkers (Nicolas Malebranche).
This is the Ashari doctrine. Previously there were two competing views, the first was the determinism school of thought (ie that God alone is the sole author of events) but the obvious rejoinder is where is the mercy of God if he punishes humans for actions that are entirely his own?
The alternative or Mutalizzite view (Aristotelean) was that man was an independent author of his own actions. The Islamic rejoinder to this is that if man is the creator of his own actions than God as creator has been limited.
The Ashari doctrine is that all matter at its core consists of single particles (or units of matter) and that these are created and vanish instantaneously ie that they have no duration, the doctrine is one of “occasionalism”
Thus there is no natural causality in the world, one can say that act a predictably gives rise to act b, because as a mercy of Allah to his creation , he acts predictably).
The Ashari theology is “scientifically” the most correct way to understand causation in the world. Stephen Hawking’s brief history of time sums up the new physics very eloquently, sub- atomic particles can not be spoken of as particles alone in time. Thus we cannot speak meaningfully of the generation of acts.
The next issue that arises is one of theodicy, or the nature of evil. The Ashari view is that there is no intrinsic good and evil to any action beyond what God considers these actions to be. ie good actions are good because God alone considers these actions to be good.
The ashari theory makes everything even more dependent on god’s will and determinism. There is only one cause- god- and one consequence- the whole universe. There’s the further complication that- as god is outside time and knows everything that happens- god creates the whole universe in every dimension including time as one act at one “moment” which means free will is impossible too. It’s perfectly possible that the moment in time when god creates the universe is in the future and we are- in “real time” merely witing for god to make us and the universe.
If “good actions are good because God alone considers these actions to be good” then goodness is as arbitrarily defined as the rules of a game, and god, in fact, is not good in himself because god exists independently of good and evil. God can only be good if there is a measure of goodness that exists separately from god. However, if there is such a measure it looks very much as though god isn’t actually good.
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